My Lords, my Amendment 63 comes within this group. It is an extremely important amendment and one that is so central to the Bill that I hope there will be general agreement with its purpose. It may not be in perfect form; that is a different matter.
The amendment would insist that, alongside, there would be a central database of meetings between Ministers and external organisations, as recorded under the Ministerial Code. As the Minister said earlier, and as has been said on other occasions, not least at Second Reading, there is wide agreement across your Lordships’ House that the movement towards more transparency on meetings, with reports from various Ministers about what meetings have taken place with outside organisations, has been a major step forward under the present coalition Government. In fact, I was astonished to learn that this is the first Government to proactively publish the details of such meetings.
There is nevertheless a concept known among transparency campaigners as “hidden in plain sight”. That means that important information about who is bringing influence to bear in government may be published but may still be obscured by the form in which it is published. That is the issue to which I made reference at Second Reading and to which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, made reference earlier, when we had a brief exchange. That is critical to making progress in this direction.
To find out who Tesco has met in government over the past 12 months, you need to go manually to each of 26 different departmental websites, and then you have to look at spreadsheets for each quarter. There are therefore 104 spreadsheets that you need to find, and you then need to download them—just to get one simple bit of information: who has Tesco been talking to over the past 12 months? You will probably find that one or two departments have not even got around to publishing for the latest quarter, so it is not in real time. Indeed, by the time that department does publish that information, the influence that has been exerted over important legislation might have come and gone, right through Parliament. There is simply no opportunity to see what has happened.
You might find that one or two departments have broken or defective links that lead nowhere; we discovered that when we looked at some of the relevant spreadsheets. Surely it should not be necessary for a citizen, journalist or indeed parliamentarian to spend days looking for such simple information. The technology is there. Having made such a good start, this Government should surely not be hiding what is happening at this level simply because the systems that they are using are not up to the job.
If the Government took up the suggestion in our amendment, a simple and searchable central database for all their meeting data would mean that we could take the sting out of the calls, here and elsewhere, for an enormous lobbying register. We would have immediate access. This would fulfil my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth’s objectives: we would have the information, very accessibly, at our fingertips very quickly. It would not matter whether the lobbyist was a professional consultant or an in-house one, a charity or some other
organisation; the information about who was talking to whom within the governmental system would be available relatively accessibly.
In my office we started to try to put together the spreadsheets for different departments. We just did two or three departments for one quarter in order to see if this experiment could be undertaken by anyone—parliamentarians or people outside. Excel itself can then produce a list of external organisations that have met Ministers. Quickly we could see who had met Ministers in more than one department, right across Whitehall. Surely that should be the objective that we all have. If we can do that in my office, there is no reason why departments and the Government collectively should not and could not do so. If it was done professionally, the data would then need to be parsed to ensure that if a meeting with BT came up, for example, it was indicated whether the meeting was registered as with BT, with BT Group or in other formats. Clearly there has to be some moderating intervention, but in this day and age that is surely not too difficult or expensive a task to ask of Government in the interests of transparency, which is surely what this initiative is all about. Then the result will be a fully searchable database, online, for all to examine—interested citizens, organisations outside Parliament, journalists and us. We could see what exactly had happened in the process of influencing legislation or executive decisions.
To make it more effective still, government departments should surely be able to publish these data at least on a monthly basis. Previously the Minister explained that he records very carefully all such meetings. Why should other Ministers not do so on a monthly basis rather than a quarterly basis? Surely that is no more difficult than doing so on a wider time basis. Anyone who has tried to influence the Government knows that time is critical. Get in at the right moment, or you fail. Given the way in which legislation, particularly statutory instruments, can go through both Houses of Parliament relatively speedily, if you do not know who has talked to whom within a matter of a few weeks after their meeting has taken place, the exercise becomes purely academic.
We need to see when people have been exerting influence at the same time as that influence may have had effect, not three or six months later. These would be very simple but very significant improvements. I hope that the Government, who have now created a more transparent system for meetings—the first time that any Government have attempted this—can see that this is the way to be more transparent still, and that surely is precisely what Parliament should be asking in the context of this legislation.